After a dreadfully boring first 250 pages of Malice, The Faithful and the Fallen turns into an amazingly action-packed, emotional, and tense epic fantasy saga that I couldn’t put down. It’s an incredible turnaround, and most definitely worth the wait; however, if you don’t want to suffer through that 250-page beginning, at the end of my review I’m including a summary of events that I wrote as things were starting to pick up so that you can skip straight to the part where it gets amazing.

I don’t think it was possible for this series to fully live up to the standard set by book 1, and it didn’t, but by no means does that make the next two books unentertaining or low quality. Book 3 falls off a bit more even more than book 2 did, but it’s still a very fun, fast-paced adventure story set in an vivid steampunk world with a deep lore and cool magic system.

In short, A Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery is a very satisfying continuation of the trilogy, much more so than I was expecting or hoping for, after such an excellent and well-self-contained book 1. It’s definitely worth continuing the trilogy for more of what An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors had to offer!

“The Lord of Stariel is dead. Long live the Lord of Stariel. Whoever that is,” proclaims the blurb, and The Lord of Stariel begins with a prologue literally titled “An Ominous Prologue.” What follows is a delightful quartet that is not at all as un-serious as one might expect from such a first impression, but still retains a relatively light-hearted atmosphere with an intimate scope. There’s magic, minor battle scenes, and other standard fantasy fare, but the focus is primarily on Hetta dealing with her family, potential lovers, and increasingly complex politics.

Let me preface this review by saying that overall I did enjoy this trilogy. I found the plot to be engaging (especially in the second book), and the political tensions along with several of the antagonists (Gassandrid in particular) were very well-crafted. However, for each of its broad strengths, The Licanius Trilogy had a number of specific weaknesses, so the majority of my review is going to be critical.

The first half of The Paladin Caper combines the best parts of The Palace Job - the humor and character interactions - with the best parts of The Prophecy Con - the true high fantasy plot - as the ancients are beginning to return to the world. It introduces the perfect villain for the setting, incompetent yes-man Handel Westteich. And it even finds a way to make Kail’s “your mother” jokes funny. After completion of the first arc, the novel flounders for a bit, but the payout of the climax is excellent and well worth the wait.

Where The Palace Job was incapable of taking itself seriously for more than a couple paragraphs at a time, The Prophecy Con returns with a high-stakes storyline from the start with the fates of nations - and perhaps the world - relying on the back of this volume’s heist. Or, more accurately, heists. Remember “The Love Song Eillenfiniel” that we just spent an entire book stealing and then gave to the elves? Yep, it’s time to steal it all over again. Why? Er…the crew isn’t quite sure, and they need to figure it out quickly.

A hilarious heist novel with an ensemble cast, The Palace Job tells the story of a…bookseller who attempts to…acquire and sell a book. Plans are created and foiled, a prophecy may or may not be involved, lots of things go wrong, some things go right, and hilarity ensues.

A Natural History of Dragons is a nice opener to a series that I have not yet continued, but I’ve heard gets much better. It’s narrated by a much older Lady Trent, looking back at her childhood and early adulthood, and the majority of the appeal is her narrative voice rather than the story, though the story is acceptably enjoyable as well. Lady Trent, then known as Isabella, is obsessed with dragons. She wants to study them, to observe them, to draw them, to understand them.

The Poppy War trilogy will always have a special place in my heart because it’s the trilogy that got me back into reading fantasy. Someone copied an entire page or two from the first novel into a thread of the worst opening lines in fantasy and I suddenly wanted to read more, and four days later I’d finished the trilogy.